Article 2.4: All applicant registrars are required to indicate the languages they support… The Registrar warrants that it shall make available terms and conditions of service, set out services and prices and provide customer support in the languages indicated… if the registrar fails to provide such services in one or more of the indicated languages… such failure will constitute a material breach of this Agreement.

Article 3: EURID will register any grant the right to use any domain name… if the application is in line with the applicable terms and conditions of the registration agreement.

Article 4: Registration Agreement. The Registrar must guarantee that the Holder has accepted the registration agreement applicable when the application is made.

During the Registration process, the Registrar will always submit (including but not limited to any submission in the WHOIS database) the data of the end user who made the initial request for the registration of the domain name(s) concerned and not its own data.

Article 15.6: The Registrar has the obligation to communicate to EURID the exact reference of the part of its website where referral is made to the Domain Name registration.

REGISTRATION POLICY.

Section 5: A request for Registration of a domain name will only be considered complete when, through a Registrar, the Registrant provides the Registry with at least the following information:

(ii) address and country within the community

The Registry is entitled to reject a request for Domain Name Registration or to revoke a domain name for which the Registrant has provided incomplete or inaccurate information.

.EU DOMAIN NAME REGISTRATION TERMS AND CONDITIONS.

“Application” – means a complete, technically correct request for a domain name registration submitted to the Registry, which complies with all the requirements provided for in the Registration Guidelines.

Section 4: The Registrant represents and warrants that:

2. All information provided to the Registry during the domain name registration process is true, complete and accurate.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION REGULATION NO 874/2004 of 28 April 2004

3. Accreditation of registrars should be carried out by the Registry following a procedure that ensures fair and open competition between Registrars. (as in Article 4e of EC REG 733/2002 of 22nd April 2002)

4. Registrars should only accept applications for the registration of domain names filed after their accreditation.

Article 4: The procedure for the accreditation of registrars shall be determined by the Registry… and shall ensure effective and fair conditions of competition.

Article 5: A registrar who receives more than one registration request for the same name shall forward those requests to the Registry in the chronological order in which they were received.

Only applications received after the date of accreditation shall be forwarded to the Registry.

Article 6: The Commission shall be assisted by the Communications Committee established by Article 22 (1) of Directive 2002/21/EC

Richard, as usual you were right on the money with this one. Being in Canada I didn't much pay attention to.eu, being disqualified due to living on the wrong side of the pond. BTW some of the later newscoverage on this.eu blackout says the evildoers are from the UK, not the US (damn, probably more typosquatters). I think the salient point here is that.biz and.info were gamed in the same way (I'm not talking about cybersquatting or anything like that), I'm talking about fake registrars lining up 20+ abreast. Crikey, Stalin woulda shot them for that. Russian proverb: under Capitalism, it's dog eat dog, under Communism, it's the other way around.

So, despite the.eu having a blueprint about how the bad actors will likely behave, there appears to have beem almost nothing done to guard against it a few years later. In the real world this might be called incompetence.

But to EURid's credit, as I say, at least they shut some down. I mentioned occaasional ICANN accredited registrar BondiLLc who gamed the system for.biz and.info and they either still own the names or have sold them downline, no doubt for a profit to a bigger fool.

For those who don't know (and I apparently can't point to my article on that here since ICANNWatch changed their frontend), BondiLLC was a front for Marc Ostrofsky, who really got the dialing domains for dollars rush going by buying business.com and then selling it to himself through a front (d'ya notice how that word keeps coming up?) and then selling it again for a record $10 mill to eBusiness.com (and don't get me on the subject of those characters, just do a search on fsckedcompanies.com), some few of the details on business.com are here [webdevelopersjournal.com].

So what is that $10 mill doing for eCompanies now? Apparently [ecompanies.com] not much. And BondiLLC is apparently no [bondillc.com] longer an ICANN accredited registrar. Laughing all the way to the bank, sans ICANN sanctions, but not their profit. And, this is delicious, when I checked bondillc.com a week ago it was an entirely different site, mebbe it's those pesky name-drop-checkers or whatever having a go. Even more scrumpious, Marc Ostrofsky and the late Kenneth Lay (of Enwrong fame [wikipedia.org]) shared the same Houston lawyer. Y'know pardner, I gotta say they do everything bigger in Texas, with all due apologies to WMD Dubya. It would just be more more sporting if any of what they all spout was true. -g